U60 Lammania Preview 1 - XP System Adjustments

[Monkey_Archer]

It was pointed out by someone else already, but the more I think about it the more it really rings true. u59 let us heal between pulls on reaper without penalities. This means less downtime scrolling back to full health. This would mean faster completion times all around for anyone who ever spent time healing up between fights. You could pretty much explain any time differences seen off this factor alone.

Yep. Running a caster at full zerg speed while killing everything hasn't changed my completion times or increased red alerts, but the average player in DDO is a non-zerging non-optimal melee build who likely just saved at least a minute per quest.

 

[Lotoc]

yeah really I'm not seeing the top end completion speed raising but the average going up makes sense.

 

[Yndrofian]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

Im confused. I thought the issue we were trying to fix is lag, directly correlated to players NOT terminating monsters they agro, and specifically in this thread to carrot/stick said behavior to cause less server effort.

How does decreasing player speed accomplish this? Yes, they can, and sometimes do, go hand in hand, but all of my guild play kills what we agro 95% of the time. Pugs are a little different, but I'd say 80% of those do too. Some, as mentioned before have 1 or 2 people who zerg to the end leaving literally everyone who can't keep up back in the mess of the DA.

I guess what I'm asking... Or saying... Is this: your question, @Cordovan is, to me, addressing something very different than @Torc 's question of:
-Our lag problems are less about fighting monsters, then running from monsters and leaving them far behind. The bottle neck is in the path system doing long paths as the player gets far away

So which is it? Are fast players causing lag (for whatever reason, like the server can't handle the load of so many people accomplishing so many things) or is the problem agro'd monsters?

**Edit, also, the lag issue, or at least the one we're talking about regarding pathing monsters, to be clear, this does NOT include monsters off-path and in "optional" areas, only the ones players agro... Right?

 

[Lotoc]

Im confused. I thought the issue we were trying to fix is lag, directly correlated to players NOT terminating monsters they agro, and specifically in this thread to carrot/stick said behavior to cause less server effort.

How does decreasing player speed accomplish this? Yes, they can, and sometimes do, go hand in hand, but all of my guild play kills what we agro 95% of the time. Pugs are a little different, but I'd say 80% of those do too. Some, as mentioned before have 1 or 2 people who zerg to the end leaving literally everyone who can't keep up back in the mess of the DA.

I guess what I'm asking... Or saying... Is this: your question, @Cordovan is, to me, addressing something very different than @Torc 's question of:
-Our lag problems are less about fighting monsters, then running from monsters and leaving them far behind. The bottle neck is in the path system doing long paths as the player gets far away

So which is it? Are fast players causing lag (for whatever reason, like the server can't handle the load of so many people accomplishing so many things) or is the problem agro'd monsters?

I mean the way you go fastest is to spend as little time killing as you can get away with and usually the people doing such behavior aren't keen to group without a buddy bonus going on.
I am questioning how such players are killing bosses through the massive damage reduction they get under red alert now but maybe they just all started using invisibility again to avoid red alert.

 

[ollicep]

TLDR: Is there a way to balance xp in such a way that going the most direct route in a quest (currently the majority of players as I understand it) still takes the same amount of time and provides the same xp as it does presently AND somehow encourage players to kill their aggros?

You asked for details and specifics:
I play 1 toon working diligently on 100% completionist. Ive been playing about 3 years ish (i started in HC4 with brothers and been playing regularly since).

I am working thru racials first (because Im dumb) and so I played wizard as gnome 3x to learn all the spells, then i swapped to tiefling sorc, then dragonborn paladin etc. 3 lives each. I wanted to learn the game and play the basics before moving into the multiclassing and other stuff.

I played R1 because thats what the majortiy of parties was when I started and I was new so I didnt want to solo. Now I have about 16 past lives and 63 reaper points. I have a firm grasp of the game mechanics, quests, and spells so now im learning different classes (just learned bear druid and blight is next).

I enjoy the grind hard then get a resource, improve toon, repeat method. (I like grinding pokemon too) so the leveling up, get a racial AP and then reset slightly stronger in a different build to try something new is cool.

I work full time 40-50 hours and play in my free time. If ssg increases the time it takes each lap (leveling to 32)) then it makes the whole grind less attainable. So to make it take me 50% more time to get to cap would mean just not playing anymore.

Notes on gameplay: I play quests on the most direct routes but clear room by room as I go. I rarely get conquest because i dont go in extra/opt rooms but i dont leave anything alive in room to room. So with this current change (i understand its in review), i would either have to take more time going into additional rooms to get the additional kills to then get the same xp as i do now, or i would have to spend extra time running extra quests for the same xp as I do now.

My issue is tempo. It can take a week or more to get to Cap right now (especially with bad builds I make) and so to drag that on further makes it frustrating.

This also would force me to not use builds that cant clear rooms as quickly since to pick a single target build, stealth build, etc would take more time than an AOE blaster DPS.

I run all the expansion content because i like the gear, use no SOV, and usually will go 1-32 and back (depending how much i dislike the build)
Thanks for reading and let me know if i missed anything

 

[Griglok (Karatemack)]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

Here are a few ideas (and questions):

1. Would less instances of quests being zerged at the same time help? If so, perhaps instead of moving the first time bonus XP into conquest- just permanently turn on buddy bonus. This would have two benefits in that 1) There would be less (in theory) instances of quests being run and 2) It would encourage more grouping and LFMs.
2. Does the XP for optionals need to be updated quest by quest? If it isn't too difficult- you could increase the amount of XP rewarded for optionals to encourage people to hit those. This wouldn't have an impact on people running for RXP though.
3. Would it be possible to ADD a loot bonus based on quest optionals? (IE: hitting conquest gives an extra 10% chance at named loot that stacks with other bonuses)
4. You could add specific loot/desirable drops to optional chests.
5. Would the tech support different buffs for reapers/champs/bosses based on time? You could buff reapers/champs/bosses with a temporary bonus that starts with 25 stacks and then have each stack expire after 20 seconds?
6. It could be interesting to spawns a special champ (maybe a mimic that glues everyone) if a party accumulates a certain amount of kills on a certain time limit. That mimic should spawn a special chest with a decent loot table (special augs, rare scrolls, tokens of the 12, etc.). It would slow some parties down and provide some level of reward to parties who choose not to slow down anyway.
7. Add more sagas. I know in the past it was mentioned that it's a lot of work, but if you add sagas and include 3-4 longer quests that could help as well. Right now VIPs skip 1 quest and you can shard to skip a 2nd- so you would need to add 3-4 longer quests to encourage players to hit those along the way. Sagas XP rewards long-term gameplay.
8. Make explorer area XP better. There are some areas later in the game that are great, but for most of the game explorers are not really worth the time. If players being in explorer areas longer would help, provide more incentives for players to spend more time in these areas. Also, if having less instances helps- would it be possible to make it so that every area supports a raid party for explorer zones?

 

[Oliphant]

This is going to be one of those bubble burst epiphany updates and a lot of people are going to drift away.

 

[Hobgoblin]

“Since the invention of the idea there have been five ideas that were rated the most stupid, the most asinine . This one left them all behind.”

 

[frezar14]

I do appreciate the replies by Cordovan and Torc. It's nice they are replying. Thank you for that.

Some (more) of my recent data from Epic quests for whatever its worth:

Setting the Wards Aggression achieved 33 killed
Endgame Margar Conquest achieved 85 killed
Endgame Archbishop Onslaught achieved 10 killed
Detour Conquest achieved 143 killed
Lost in Swamp Aggression achieved 85 killed

Again, I played no differently than I have the past few years.

As far as faster play:
- I know I just achieved completionist and it took me longer in quests due to a class I wasn't used to. I'm now back to playing a class I'm much more comfortable with which means faster completion times from the last several months. I can't imagine most others being on that same timetable but maybe a good number of players are just getting better/faster?

-maybe quests can now be completed in a much shorter time due to lack of lag

-combination of above or combination of a whole bunch of things

 

[mizark3]

I don't know about how the conquest backend is done, but what about percentage of monsters (ever) aggro'd also killed. That way it also works with stealth playstyles. If I activate 100 monsters and kill 95 of them, I should get Conquest. Same if my rogue playthrough sneaks past and kills 10 of 10 aggro'd. This might need an additional 'highlight aggro'd monsters' feature so you know where enemies that you should kill are when they glitch out or hide around corners.

 

[Hobgoblin]

as far as im concerned my only advice is: nuke this idea from orbit. its the only way to be sure.

scrap this go back to the drawing board and keep asking for feedback.

the base idea is not horrible - make people play the quest more, but this isnt it

 

[Boondocks Mike]

So the only issue that these changes are truly attempting to address is: reducing unresolved player-AI interactions.

I don't think the proposed changes will be effective at achieving this outcome or positively affect the game experience for players.

First time bonuses are very, very good. They reward running different content so you are not punished for wanting variety instead of running Shadow Crypt 10 times in a row. Removing them may shift the meta back to spamming out certain quests like Kobolds New Ringleader, Shadow Crypt, etc. My guess would be that if that were the questing meta we would probably see an increase in total unresolved player-AI interactions per hour.

Without data to examine my guess would be that reducing XP/min in general doesn't correlate to player-AI interactions or whether they are resolved or not (aside from, obviously, people playing the game means people running quests). Some quests are very high XP/min with low mob density, some quests are very low XP/min with high mob density. Unless the conquest XP bonus becomes such a large share of total XP earnable in a quest I doubt it will become more efficient to change the current behavior of generally just running to the end point of a quest. Additionally, encouraging players to interact with the AI more by incentivizing conquest may in cases lead to more concurrently active AI tasks and more unresolved player-AI interactions. What happens when people start splitting up to try to achieve conquest faster? Does the AI resolve upon player death before they leave the instance? If not this seems like a recipe for increasing lag.

Running around killing non-challenging enemies isn't fun in itself, I think forcing that on people is going to be unappreciated by the very large majority of of players. And I don't think it's going to change player behavior at all, people who compulsively acquired the conquest bonus in every quest will continue to do so, and the players who don't find that interesting will continue to ignore it and simply earn less XP (which I don't see as an inherent problem). What I think would be the best solution is to make groups of enemies both more necessary AND rewarding to engage with.

1) Make enemies harder to ignore. Make melee enemies Trip and Stun and Sunder more (at all). Make archers Cripple and Sunder (give melees or at least front line melees some kind of passive resistance to Cripple (such as significantly reduced likelihood of being affect per Barb/Ftr/Pal/x level or significantly reduced duration per Barb/Ftr/Pal/x level) or require the effect to check against Fortitude). Make mages prioritize casting CC spells, cast more frequently, shred MRR on spell damage, etc. If it is primarily pathing relating AI tasks that cause lag hopefully there is some achievable level of additional threat and complexity that can be added that slows players down without causing more lag in return. I also think this would simply improve the quality of the gameplay as most enemies are simply not engaging.

2) Simply increase aggression/onslaught/conquest XP rewards at an equal rate without reducing XP elsewhere. Assuming quests take more time to complete, players will then be compensated for that increased time. In cases where player-AI interaction is not significant then nothing meaningful changes except perhaps a slight buff to XP/min in such cases which no one will complain about. By adjusting each tier of conquest proportionately players who don't need or want to achieve conquest are not punished for that. Also, quests without enough enemies to achieve conquest will not be disproportionately affected.

3) I think pushing everyone towards conquest specifically is probably a bad idea, but if that remains a goal even partly I suggest that an additional chest spawns upon quest completion which drops the same loot as the primary end chest. I think this is a much stronger incentive.

I think making grouping bonuses to XP a constant feature and reducing or eliminating reaper bonuses to non-reaper XP are also very good ideas (you already earn extra XP when you play on reaper, it is called reaper XP).

 

[Tilomere]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

Cut spell power itemization in half and revert the R7-10 nerfs.

 

[Redoubt]

Please look at quests where clearing the whole dungeon is not required for completion, but will now be required for conquest in order to get the same xp.
You mention Castle Ravenloft, but it is just one example. In Waterworks I never lower the bridge to the left. I kill everything alive to keep it off of Arlos, but I don't clear the left wing because its an optional. In situations like this, I hope you will figure out how to get back to the original xp level or better. There are many, many more and I worry that this will be a blanket application and the work to individually tune the dungeons won't happen.

Thanks!

 

[Yndrofian]

1. Make explorer area XP better.

Made me think of something...

1 bit of change to add to the "help lag" pile: Change xp in explorer areas to much smaller tiers. This will greatly incentivise killing as you run... At least for those that need XP. To be clear, give XP (in much smaller bites obviously) for every 25 or 50 (or whatever) kills instead of having to wait for 1500 kills.

If I'm not purposefully running slayer, I usually hit the first tier or two on purpose in explorer areas, the rest of the time I run by everything to get to where I'm going.

 

[Jerome]

I wonder if some of these xp changes are due to streamers showing how to hyperzerg quests because of the lag fixes?

 

[Slylok]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

Favor incentives. Releveling only to get enough favor to get the bag slots, bank slots, hit point boost and quest/raid prep that you are use to for end game fun gets very repetitive. Maybe add additional favor for getting conquest on quest? People would get their target favor rewards quicker by doing a more thorough job in a quest and have to do less quest to get there. This is really huge for iconics. I am sure no one enjoys the favor grind when clearing habor quest at lvl 15 to get coin lord favor.

 

[Monkey_Archer]

I wonder if some of these xp changes are due to streamers showing how to hyperzerg quests because of the lag fixes?

Hmm... its certainly possible that a bunch of stream watchers started doing these type of meme runs, but that definitely wasn't actually due to the U59 changes.
Live lag levels are nowhere near as good as what was advertised, and good players have always been able to run at that speed while killing everything as well.

If this really is the cause, then I would think its just going to be a self-correcting problem as people reaslize they're just slowing themselves down for the memes

 

[Dragnilar]

We've had a lot of great feedback in this thread, but one thing that we haven't seen a lot of feedback on is suggestions to get players back to the XP/minute and general questing speed that was taking place prior to Update 59. We have seen a very significant increase in general speed of play since our recent lag reduction work, and as players have noticed, it's causing issues regarding game performance. Some of the goal here is to get players back to the pace they were prior to those recent changes. So, just to ask: How would you reduce player speed as it were to pre-Update 59 levels?

Increase the bonus for ransack/mischief as well, for one.

Maybe also increase optional XP and possibly have it contribute to RXP. One of the things that irks me when I join a PUG (which is seldom) is how zergers purposely ignore smashing crates (I CAN'T RESIST IT!) or forego optional objectives.

Another thing that may be worth considering - draw some inspiration from LOTRO and add more things to the monster manual or something similar. I know that's asking for new systems and such, but I think the game could stand to have something ELSE for those of us who do not feeling like playing Dynasty Warriors & Dragons. But more to the point, at least in my head, it could help alleviate the XP loss and would also encourage people to do something more "time consuming" albeit interesting than feeling like they're on that same old TR treadmill.

 

[Rugar]

On all worlds. It is both a significant increase in completion speed in addition to a larger pool of players achieving these speeds. It is essentially why, after the recent lag work, the community has been seeing increased lag, as the speed has pushed to the point that things have become somewhat untenable. That was one of the main reasons why the suggestion to move first-time XP to the Conquest system was tried; it allows players to earn more XP in general since they can get that bonus XP every time they run the quest rather than just the first time, but also discourages some amount of the hyperzerging that had been taking place. We recognized that it would impact people's XP/minute calculations, but the hope was to find a solution that both encouraged exploration and offered generally more XP with an acceptable level of slowdown of player speed. For players who wished to continue at their current pace they still could, although they might need to run a few additional quests per level, but others might be encouraged to take advantage of these new bonuses.

First, let me thank @Torc and @Cordovan for chiming in on the post. At least knowing that you are reading some of these responses gives me hope.

Regarding your post specifically, Cordo... I can only speak for myself, my opinions, and my own experiences so go ahead and grab that grain of salt.

Completion Speed Increases
I can't speak specifically on when I began noticing the changes, but I have noticed a higher number of people able to keep up and complete quests, particularly low skull (R1-4) leveling quests without having to slow down too much. In my head I mostly attributed this to the proliferation of AoE builds for leveling. Of particular note in the U58/59 time frame are the Blightcasters. Add to this the fact that beginning in U53 you opened up some of the "best" AoE classes (looking at you Tiefling and Dragonborn) to all players. I'm betting that if you are able to parse it out by class in your fastest runtime records you are going to find a whole, whole lotta Blightcasters, Sorcs, and Warlocks. That's because when the meta for us jaded TR-grinders is XP/min, we want something where we can run until we have a group chasing us then turn, push a couple of buttons, and clear the crowd. Rinse and repeat until you hit the endfight.

Possible Solution to the Pathing Issue
This may not be an ideal solution as in the past portals have caused issues, but I think in many cases you can solve the "long path" issues with some strategically placed portals instead of doorways. Let's use an extreme example of the problem of long pathing if you run past mobs, Coalescence Chamber. You have a two giant "cylinders" connected by multiple tunnels including lots of gates that will close behind you and small tunnels/rooms that lead nowhere. If you run past mobs like the bats or scorpions, straight line distance you are not all that far away from the mobs but the path between you and them can be extremely convoluted. Mobs stay active for a LONG time in this quest and if you are running behind the leader, you will often find hordes of scorps and bats at each gate trying to find a way through. However, in my experience going through a portal of which there are multiple examples in Beyond the Rift, the mobs will lose track of you and return home. It may be worth looking at quests taking up abnormally large amounts of compute time and seeing if there is some way to break zones in the quests with portals instead of doors. In the Coal Chamber example, you could put portals into and out of the cylinders rather than gates adding pathing breaks to the quest in general.

Secondary Solution to the Pathing Issue
Note that I am absolutely not the stealth player guy... just not my way to play. There are however a lot of stealth players and they are always asking for support for this playstyle. Part 1 of this idea is to dramatically increase the Discrete, Devious, and Insidious Cunning bonuses. It never made sense to me that you get less for avoiding fights than you do for murder hobo mode. Part 2, eliminate the "alert all other mobs in a radius" that was added and replace it with actually useful alarms in the quest a la Blockade Buster. If traps go off or alarms are sounded, alert mobs in a radius around those otherwise leave them to be activated when they actually spot or hear players. Keep the DA penalties and the buffs mobs get (or even increase them if you can fix those insta-red DA quests), but if DA gets reduced run a quest-wide "go passive" command after some amount of time. This lets the sneakers bypass alarm zones or silence mobs before they can set off alarms while also making it worthwhile for even speed runners to kill mobs in areas around the alarms so they can't set them off.